New Clean URLs for Every Ecwid Store: a Simple Way to a Better SEO

SEO is important for any e-commerce merchant. That’s why we are working on the set of SEO improvements to make your stores indexed better in Google, and eventually get more organic traffic to your site.

We have just made another step in this direction and released search engine-friendly URLs for Ecwid stores.

Now URLs are simple, clean of unnecessary characters, and more understandable by both humans and search engines. The easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines, and the better your ranking will get.

The new clean URLs are available for all Ecwid stores. In this post, you’ll know what is cool about this new feature and how to enable new URLs in your store depending on where you sell: on Starter Sites, Wix, WordPress, Adobe Muse or other platforms and site builders.

What’s Good About New URLs in Ecwid

Ecwid generates URLs automatically, based on your product and category names. These links used to be long and indistinct. Now we have made them shorter and compelling.

Let’s see how the links’ structure changed and how exactly that influences a better SEO ranking:

No hashes. The new URLs do not contain the hash sign (“#”), which, according to Google, makes your store better indexed by Google.

Fewer extra characters like /, ~ or’!’. There is a number of text characters (such as < > # % { } | \ ^ ~ [ ] `) that become nasty bits of hard-to-read cruft when inserted in the URL string. We got rid of them in new SEO-friendly URLs.

Other store pages’ URLs also became cleaner, e.g. cart and checkout pages are now easily accessible on /cart and /checkout.

Fast-loading store pages. The store pages with new URLs work without page reload, as it’s always worked in Ecwid. So you have your fast-loading store pages with new, SEO-friendly URLs.

For Ecwid Starter Sites

If you use an old version of the Starter Site and want to enable the new URLs, please switch to the new version of the Starter Site in your Ecwid Control Panel — it’s free.

In order to do that, open the What’s new page in your Control Panel and enable the New & Improved Starter Site: Build & Customize your Store option. The new URLs will be automatically enabled once you switch to the new version of the Starter Site.

For Wix websites

If you use Ecwid for your Wix website, new SEO-friendly URLs are already enabled automatically. You don’t have to set anything up.

For WordPress websites

It’s very easy to enable new SEO URLs on WordPress websites: navigate to the Ecwid plugin’s advanced settings and tick the SEO-friendly URLs checkbox. Make sure you’ve updated your Ecwid plugin to the latest version. Done!

For Joomla websites

To get the clean URLs for your Ecwid store on Joomla, please update your Ecwid Joomla plugin to the latest version (v.3) and find the new clean URL option on the Ecwid component settings → Advanced page in your Joomla admin.

If you are not sure how to add those changes to your website, please refer to your site builder/hosting support or your developer. If you have a question on this, let us know which platform your site is running on and we will provide instructions on how to proceed.

I don’t have access to server settings

If you:

Use a site builder that doesn’t allow you to rewrite site URLs on the server